winston-papertrail

A Papertrail transport for winston.

Installation

Installing npm (node package manager)

  $ curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

Installing winston-papertrail

  $ npm install winston
  $ npm install winston-papertrail

There are a few required options for logging to Papertrail:

• host: FQDN or IP Address of the Papertrail Service Endpoint
• port: The Endpoint TCP Port

Usage

const winston = require('winston');
const { PapertrailConnection, PapertrailTransport } = require('winston-papertrail');

const papertrailConnection = new PapertrailConnection({
  host: 'logs.papertrailapp.com',
  port: 12345
})

papertrailConnection.on('error', function(err) {
  // Handle, report, or silently ignore connection errors and failures
});

const logger = new winston.createLogger({
  transports: [ new PapertrailTransport(papertrailConnection) ]
});

logger.info('this is my message');

There are a number of optional settings:

• disableTls - set to true to disable TLS on your transport. Defaults to false
• level - The log level to use for this transport, defaults to info
• levels - A custom mapping of log levels strings to severity levels, defaults to the mapping of npm levels to RFC5424 severities
• hostname - The hostname for your transport, defaults to os.hostname()
• program - The program for your transport, defaults to default
• facility - The syslog facility for this transport, defaults to daemon
• logFormat - A function to format your log message before sending, see below
• colorize - Enable colors in logs, defaults to false
• inlineMeta - Inline multi-line messages, defaults to false
• handleExceptions - Tell this Transport to handle exceptions, defaults to false
• flushOnClose - Flush any queued logs prior to closing/exiting
• depth - max depth for objects dumped by NodeJS util.inspect

There are also a number of settings for connection failure and retry behavior

• attemptsBeforeDecay - How many retries should be attempted before backing off, defaults to 5
• maximumAttempts - How many retries before disabling buffering, defaults to 25
• connectionDelay - How long between backoff in milliseconds, defaults to 1000
• maxDelayBetweenReconnection - The maximum backoff in milliseconds, defaults to 60000
• maxBufferSize - The maximum size of the retry buffer, in bytes, defaults to 1048576

Advanced Usage

For more some advanced logging, you can take advantage of custom formatting for Papertrail:

const logger = winston.createLogger({
  transports: [
    new PapertrailTransport(connection, {
      logFormat: function(level, message) {
          return '<<<' + level + '>>> ' + message;
      }
    })
  ]
});

logger.info('this is my message');

Transport Events

PapertrailConnection is also capable of emitting events for error and connect so you can log to other transports:

papertrailConnection.on('error', err => {
  // Do something with the error
});

papertrailConnection.on('connect', () => {
  // Do something after the connection to the Papertrail server is established
})

Colorization

The winston-papertrail transport supports colorization with winston. Currently, the ANSI codes used for escape sequences are part of the search index, so please be advised when using colorization.

const logger = winston.createLogger({
  transports: [
    new PapertrailTransport(connection, {
      colorize: true
    })
  ]
});

logger.info('Hello from colorized winston');

Closing the transport

winston-papertrail transport supports closing the transport (and the underlying TLS connection) via the PapertrailConnection#close method. Thus, you can enable scenarios where your transport automatically closes when you close the winston logger.

const winston = require('winston');
const { PapertrailConnection, PapertrailTransport } = require('winston-papertrail');

const papertrailConnection = new PapertrailConnection({
  host: 'logs.papertrailapp.com',
  port: 12345
});

const logger = new winston.createLogger({
  transports: [ new PapertrailTransport(papertrailConnection) ]
});

papertrailConnection.on('connect', function() {
    logger.info('logging before I close');
    logger.close(); // This also closes the underlying connection in the Papertrail transport
});

Author: Ken Perkins